This collection of eighteen essays, prefaced by a historiographical introduction, derives from contributions to a conference held at Marburg, Germany in 2017, dedicated to crusading on the peripheries of the Christian West. With the exception of an outlying piece on the Iberian military orders in the later middle ages and a study of the recruiting role of the Observant Franciscan custodians of the Holy Places, the collective focus is on the role played by crusade rhetoric, ideology, and occasional action in the defence of eastern and central Europe from non-Christian adversaries, chiefly Ottoman, from the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries. Until recently, in Franco- and Anglo-phone crusade historiography, this period in the vast region stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans has been paid little attention. Not the least value of this weighty collection lies in its display, often in substantial footnotes, of the extensive and growing corpus of German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Rumanian, and Russian scholarship.

Appropriately, most of the contributors are drawn from the regions under scrutiny, in themselves witnesses to the depth of regional academic interest, providing a useful balance to the more familiar paladins of crusade studies, although the first offering, on the various means and avenues of communication between Christendom’s eastern frontline and putative western helpers, is by one of the doyens of late medieval anti-Ottoman crusading, Norman Housley. Most of the rest of the articles adopt a detailed, descriptive narrative approach, concentrating on high political relations and diplomacy, in studies of topics that range from the familiar--the Teutonic Knights’ debate at the Council of Constance, the battle of Nicopolis, the Hussite crusades or the Varna campaign--to the less well-known, such as the conflicted liminal precarities of Wallachia or Bosnia.

Certain themes run throughout. One is the element of cross-confessional Christian solidarity in the lower Danube and northern Balkans in the face of Turkish and Tartar advances, reflecting the overlapping Latin and Greek rulers and populations as well as the need for papal aid for Constantinople. Another revolves around the triangular relations between the Teutonic Knights, Poland, and Lithuania. In particular, much scrutiny across a number of essays is given to the transformation of fourteenth-century pagan Lithuania into a fifteenth-century self-proclaimed bastion of Christendom. Ex-pagans as crusaders (e.g., from Darius Baronas’s excellent account of Lithuanian crusading, 163, fig. 14) sums up the fluidity of identity and purposes that supplies much of the grist for these essays. Other highlights include Attila Bárany’s discussion of Sigismund of Hungary’s campaigns after Nicopolis (although describing them as passagiaparticulare is misleading); and Emir O. Filipović’s concise evocation of the complexities of Bosnian religious and ecclesiastical status. Inevitably, lacunae appear (e.g., the absence of Timothy Guard’s monograph on English crusaders, including in the Baltic, from Benjámin Borrás’s piece) but rarely. However, only two contributions reach far beyond the descriptive: Sven Jaros’s analytical account of the Polish annexation of Ruthenia in the fourteenth century that challenges the role and importance of the “crusading idea” in this process, a critical awareness not consistently shared elsewhere in the collection; and Pavel Soukup’s subtle investigation into the surprisingly defensive justifications for the Hussite crusade that seemed to smack of desperation, as he concludes (375): “Too often the anti-Hussite crusade proved weak in practice and sterile in theory. Venerable tradition turned out to be a burden when it came to innovating the rhetoric of legitimacy.” How far such a verdict applied or not to the other crusade theatres is, perhaps regrettably, left largely unexplored in the rest of the volume. Nevertheless, in general, this collection provides a series of valuable insights into often neglected tangled area of central and eastern European political history as well as suggesting fresh avenues for research.